Telegram CEO Pavel Durov has officially announced that Telegram will take control of The Open Network from the TON Foundation, marking a significant shift in the blockchain's governance structure. According to Durov's official announcement, Telegram will 'replace the TON Foundation as the driving force behind TON and become its largest validator', representing the biggest previous step in the ongoing 'Make TON Great Again' roadmap. The network has also implemented operational improvements, slashing transaction fees and boosting the block rate to process transactions more rapidly, positioning the platform for enhanced user experience and adoption.
The TON Foundation is rebranding its native token from Toncoin to Gram, reviving the name attached to Telegram's original 2018 blockchain project and signaling a deliberate push to convert the messaging platform's 900 million monthly active users into on-chain participants. As Durov explained, 'Gram was the original name of TON's currency in the first white paper' and 'We're returning to our roots—and starting a new chapter'. The rebrand arrives as part of the broader governance transition, with Durov framing this as step four of seven in his publicly stated 'Make TON Great Again' roadmap, with steps five through seven still undisclosed.
Market participants responded positively to Durov's announcement, with TON surging more than 13% in the last day to reach a recent price of $2.12, with the token rising as high as $2.26 earlier in the day. The latest market data shows TON trading at 1.75 EUR per token, with the cryptocurrency maintaining strong momentum following the governance announcement. The rebranding process will take approximately three weeks across wallets, infrastructure providers, and ecosystem applications, with user balances, staking positions, and network operations remaining unchanged throughout the transition period.
The transmission mechanism from name change to user acquisition is straightforward: reduce the cognitive gap between Telegram's brand identity and its native crypto asset. As reported, Gram was the name at the center of a landmark SEC enforcement action that forced Telegram to return $1.2 billion to investors in 2020. The compounding dynamic here is regulatory history, with Gram being the name at the center of a landmark SEC enforcement action that forced Telegram to return $1.2 billion to investors in 2020. Reviving that name is a calculated bet that the current TON ecosystem has enough structural distance from that legal episode to reclaim the brand without inheriting its liability.
The structural opportunity is not speculative; it is conditional on conversion rates. According to reports, if the TON ecosystem converts even 1% of Telegram's active base into regular Gram wallet users, that is 9 million participants, a figure that rivals the active user counts of several top-ten blockchain networks. The friction point has always been brand coherence, with Telegram users encountering TON Space wallet, mini-apps, and bot-based payment tools that reference a token called Toncoin with the ticker TON, a label that carries no intuitive connection to the Telegram product they already use daily.
